Watts' competitive streak a double-edged sword

Mikal Watts is a courtroom pit bull, a superstar personal-injury attorney who has rubbed shoulders with shady characters and worked every angle of the legal system to build a colossal fortune.

At the same time, he's a pious family man who faithfully attends Oak Hills Church and speaks of his casework as a kind of calling to compensate victims of corporate negligence.

He's a sugar daddy for the Democratic Party, pouring more than $7 million into party coffers and hosting fundraisers for Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Julián Castro at his Dominion mansion. At the same time, he risked the disdain of Democratic loyalists during a short-lived 2008 U.S. Senate campaign by openly asserting his belief that abortion should be illegal in this country.

Watts' complex nature is under scrutiny this week because of a federal investigation into his handling of thousands of Gulf Coast tort cases related to the 2010 BP oil spill. San Antonio Express-News reporter Guillermo Contreras wrote Wednesday that Secret Service agents raided Watts' offices in February, looking for BP case files.

Personal-injury law is a game for alpha dogs, and Watts is the biggest canine on the block. His chief weapons: a sharply analytical mind that even his adversaries admire, and a competitive streak that doesn't rest just because he's made hundreds of millions of dollars and has an NBA-level indoor basketball gym that occasionally lures members of the Spurs for pickup games.

The same uber-competitive nature that pushed him to get his law degree at the age of 21 has also prompted him to find clients through suspected case runners such as Willie Garcia in the Valley and Mauricio Celis in Corpus Christi. (Case running is the illegal act of soliciting clients on behalf of an attorney. It's a third-degree felony in Texas but is rarely prosecuted.)

It also compelled Watts to send a letter to Corpus Christi attorney Don Schauer, advising him to accept a settlement, because Watts had the members of a Corpus Christi appeals court in his pocket.

One source talks about Watts hiring someone in 2005 to go to a Crystal City distribution center and buy up every copy of the Express-News, because he didn't want people there to see a negative article about him at a time when his firm was litigating a case against Ford Motor Co.

Then there's the story of a Corpus Christi woman who says she was frightened one night by the sound of banging on her door, only to find a case runner bearing brochures from Watts' law firm, and aggressively trying to sign her up as a client.

Given Watts' competitive nature, there was no way he could have stayed away from the BP legal madhouse.

With tens of thousands of potential clients scattered across the region, it was a case-runners' haven that seemed destined for chaos. Watts didn't need the money or the aggravation, but he rarely resists a challenge, and he didn't resist this one.

Watts' allies insist that Gulf Coast lawyers, overwhelmed by the scale of the BP morass, began referring cases to Watts. They say this explains why many Mississippi shrimp-boat workers went to file complaints and found that they couldn't, because an attorney they didn't know — Watts — already had filed complaints for them. They also suggest that some of the referring lawyers mistakenly signed up people who didn't want to be included in the case.

Wattts alluded to this narrative in a statement this week when he referred to “mistakes made by others” possibly gumming up the works.

Watts' detractors privately snipe that all his wealth and political influence have convinced him he's untouchable. In truth, however, Watts paid a major price during his Senate campaign for his controversial legal practices.

Stories about his association with Celis began to dog the campaign, and while Watts pinned his withdrawal on a desire to spend more time with his family, the bad press certainly factored in the decision.

Whether he's guilty of legal impropriety in the BP case or merely the victim of a tip from a malicious rival (as his supporters contend), Watts again finds himself in a situation he can't control.